Frick Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsyvlania. March 2016. After three months in discussion with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, we received confirmation from the PBP legal department of what we already knew, that male and female bare-chestedness is to be treated the same under Pennsylvania law.

Last week I opened my email to find a message from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police legal department confirming, after three months of conversation, that public female bare-chestedness is legal in Pennsylvania.

Here’s what they wrote:

“CONCLUSION There is no City or State law which expressly prohibits or even addresses the act of appearing bare-breasted in public. Based upon the information provided to the Law Department, the City does not appear to have any legal grounds under the City Code or Title 18 (i.e. the Commonwealth’s Crimes Code) to cite or arrest women for being bare-chested without any additional sexual or criminal behavior associated therewith…

Effort to get people to cover up in Ile du Levant, France, exposes discord in longtime nudist colony

By Noemie Bisserbe

ILE DU LEVANT, France—On a blustery morning on this Mediterranean island, dozens of naked men and women marched arm-in-arm in defense of their right to bare bottoms.

The target of their protest was Jean-Yves Gacon, who is wielding his authority as head of the island’s homeowners association to force people to wear clothing. The coverup has the backing of the mayor’s office as well as local police who are stopping anyone who dares stroll through the village square without clothes.

“The traditions of this place need to be preserved,” says Elizabeth Varet, a 70-year-old retired English teacher who attended the protest, held last year, in the buff.

Shame is a feeling of social rejection and isolation, and almost nothing in human emotion can rival its power.

We are social creatures, we feel secure in groups, and when a group sets us outside its boundaries we feel vulnerable and exposed and terrified.

Lone zebras get eaten.

I walk bare-chested because I enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives me. I started quietly walking bare-chested publicly two years ago. The vast majority of my interactions with passersby were and remain neutral or positive, but there was a learning curve in those early walks. A Washington D.C. police officer once stopped me and said, “It may be legal [to be bare-chested], but we’re going to arrest you anyway, because it’s unreasonable.”

He did not arrest me. I had broken no law. He was just trying to use his perceived power to shame me into conformity.

I have spent a lot of time studying fear and anxiety, both generally and how it relates to normalizing female bare-chestedness.

I traveled to New Hamphire this week to attend the trial of the women who asked to be cited after police officers asked them to cover their breasts at a Gilford town beach.

Two witnesses testified that they were mothers and were offended on behalf of their and other children. One said she was offended in her own right, and didn’t want her son to see breasts.

I also just watched poorly made news footage from Woodlawn Beach in Buffalo where women have apparently been going bare-chested with some regularity (according to the hyperbolic reporting) and they managed to find an offended mother who said she was totally fine with topless sunbathing, just not in front of her daughter.

Regarding New Hampshire House Bill 1525, which would amend the state’s indecent exposure law to forbid female breast exposure but not male breast exposure.

Dear New Hampshire Representatives:

My name is Chelsea Covington and I am writing to offer some thoughts on Representative Brian Gallagher’s House Bill 1525, seeking to amend the state’s indecent exposure statute to forbid the exposure of female breasts but not male breasts. New Hampshire law currently treats female and male breast exposure equally.

As you probably know by now, a social movement to normalize female bare-chestedness is gaining traction across the country. Representative Gallagher’s bill is a reaction to a peaceful action that occurred in Laconia, which has one of the few local ordinances barring female bare-chestedness in New Hampshire.

Georgetown University, Washington D.C. December 2015. Who says global climate change isn’t real? 70 degrees on December 13? But it made for a nice normal walk… no negative interactions in three hours.

I walk bare-chested primarily because I enjoy feeling free. My strong secondary reason for walking bare-chested is to normalize female bare-chestedness, so that other women may feel the same way.

The only way to normalize anything is to do it with so much regularity and normality that people stop being afraid of it and start seeing it as conventional behavior. This is my motivation for posting photos and videos of my walks. I want people to see and hear for themselves the reactions (and more importantly the non-reactions) of the public as I walk by.

There exists this misconception that going bare-chested is some disruptive act of revolution and that traffic will stop and babies will cry. Perhaps…

Why should the men in this picture be allowed to be topless in public but not the women? In fact, the women in this picture were allowed to be topless in public one Sunday in August 2014 at Mont-Royal in support of topless equal rights for women. Sylvie Chabot (centre, in white jeans) leads a march around the George-Etienne Monument on Mont-Royal as part of a Go Topless demonstration. (Photo by Jillian Page exclusively for jillianpage.com.)

It seems sad in this modern age that women are still not allowed to go topless in public places where men are allowed to do so.